However, previous welfare mapping exercises have proven especially successful in predicting one particular class of measures: asset indices, usually defined as the first principle component of an asset ownership matrix. These outcomes are attractive for their relative availability of ground truth data, but may omit important aspects of well-being. Asset ownership evolves slowly [1]} and is generally low in developing country contexts [2]}, and so may smooth-over large short-term changes in well-being. As such, asset index predictions are likely less amenable to use in downstream tasks such as identifying locations most severely affected by a shock or determining the short-run outcomes of a policy. Previous studies that have sought to predict per capita consumption expenditure, which is more responsive to transient fluctuations in well-being, alongside an asset index have found substantial performance reductions [3]}, [4]}. This may be due to the relatively little within-unit variance in satellite images' signal compared to consumption expenditure, as shown in [fig:withinvar]Figure 1.
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